Hopeless Romantic

I am a hopeless romantic.
And you don't have to worry. This isn't meant for you.
I'm through leaving you veiled messages and mangled metaphors.
I've no time for games of hide and seek.

I know what I want, and I'll get it someday.
Because even though my heart is breaking at the loss of you-
I am in love with life.
Even through the pain of this separation, there is a string of endless moments
of stark and startling beauty all around me.

Today it was the kind of hot that warms you from the inside out,
and the comforting weight of the warm wind coursed through my open palm
as it coasted out the window.
And I couldn't be bothered with sorrow anymore.
I couldn't spare a single tear more for you today.
I was filled with the knowledge that life is beautiful.
And people fall in and out of love all the god damn time.
Some of us, too easily.

But I refuse to be faulted for that.
There's something paradoxical
about the fact that I have had my heart
fall into love and broken by it so often over my life.
Part of me says that I know this is something I want badly enough
to search and work for it.
And part of me says, I've been settling, or getting distracted, or just getting impatient.

So I inflated some people I shouldn't have to a place
where I might have shared my life with them.
Just to say I achieved that state I have so longed for.
But now, I can't deny it.
I'll fall in love, over and over
until I meet the woman who will fall in love with me
over and over everyday for the rest of our lives
the way I will with her.

And you can call it impossible.
Say it's ridiculous.
But I know it happens.
And I know, it's going to happen to me someday.
And I know that to get there, I have to stay open.
I have to not blame love, but rather, come to understand it.
It just does what it is meant to do, it brings people together.

So even if that's only for a short time, or a whole lifespan.
It can, and does happen all of the time.

You would think since I've told you so often by now
that I am fed up with this
that I would have given up on love.
Instead I've found a new kind of faith in it.

Today I listened to love songs, and sang along, and I couldn't have been happier.
In some ways, I have you to thank for that faith.
And in others, I'll have more work before me until I can find a relationship worthy of my emotional and physical investment.

But I'm not scared anymore.
I didn't stay with you for fear of being alone.
I didn't stay with you out of fear at all.
I stayed because I saw value.
I stayed because I saw your core values and fell in love with them.
I stayed. Because I wanted to.

But the fact remains now, I've also changed.
I want different things too.
I want the kind of love I know I will have someday with the same kind of certainty I know I will someday have the family I yearn for.

I'm ready for it, and like you said-
I just haven't found the right person yet.
But I will. I know that I will.

And what we will have together
will be something unconventional I am sure
because I have never loved in any way that could be called
conventional.